Books, Volume 14 #2

Denis Smith, Rogue Tory: The Life and Legend of John G. Diefenbaker. Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1995. 720 pp. $39.95.

Peter C. Newman, The Canadian Revolution: From Deference to Defiance, 1985-1995. Toronto: Viking, 1995. 476 pp. $35.

According to his own memoirs, John George Diefenbaker determined his ambition to become prime minister of Canada when he was eight years old. According to some correspondence between John and his adoring younger brother Elmer, the decision was made when John was six. In his admirable biography of John Diefenbaker, Rogue Tory, Denis Smith sides with brother Elmer. This inconsequential piece of trivia is illustrative of Smith's approach and of his findings.

From the very largest issues to the smallest and most petty, Diefenbaker's memoirs, both formal and informal, are self-serving to the point of being almost totally unreliable, and Smith is tenacious in getting to the facts. This means a hundred pages of tightly packed notes, an exhaustive index and an awesome, frightening bibliography.

Whether from age six or eight, Diefenbaker's goal was to be prime minister, and over half a century there was absolutely nothing in his thought, being, action and personal/political relationships that was not focused on that goal. Once this goal was achieved against all odds in 1957, the focus shifted to staying in office and then, in the wake of the utter collapse of his ministry in 1963, to creating his myth. "The Prime Minister was not an active policy-maker," writes Smith. "He came to power with few general objectives, no timetable and no strategy. Above all his instincts were tuned to his daily portion of adulation--and to the next general election."

In Smith's eyes, Diefenbaker was little more than a scheming young political opportunist who became a scheming old political opportunist who became a scheming opportunist emeritus. But in this long process a goodly slice of Canadian history--especially western political history, which has shaped our modern political reality more than we suspect--was written. Smith puts this in context. Diefenbaker came to office at a time of tremendous pressures on Canada. The "Quiet Revolution" was about to mature in Quebec, Britain's entry into Europe was about to end any countervailing force to North American economic integration, the Cold War was about to enter a new phase with a militant young U.S. president, and Canada's military absorption through NORAD was now formalized. Diefenbaker neither recognized, understood nor even related to any of this.

In Smith's eyes, Diefenbaker was little more than a scheming young political opportunist who became a scheming old political opportunist who became a scheming opportunist emeritus.

And so we are left with the myth: the firebrand, populist civil libertarian lawyer (not really); the devoted Man of the House who laboured diligently in Canada's parliamentary vineyards (he made some dandy speeches but left most of the legislative heavy lifting to others); the Canadian nationalist who led the good fight against the rude encroachments of the Americans (he was little more than a pain in the butt to the American administration and the content of his fight with the U.S. was personal). Even on the issue of nuclear weapons, Diefenbaker's indecisiveness grew out of nothing more than his personal political calculations. Diefenbaker's bigotry is also a myth. Smith lays to rest the old charge that Diefenbaker was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, although he certainly used and allowed himself to be used by the Klan for a time. Conversely, his protests against the proud and strident racial and religious bigotry of the old Ontario Tory Orange machine were conditioned largely by the fact that the prairies were now being populated by immigrants from middle Europe, many of them Catholics, and they were beginning to vote.

In his introduction to a 1972 edition of Peter C. Newman's Diefenbaker study, Renegade in Power, Denis Smith criticized Newman for his reliance on Liberal sources, unsureness "in the use of abstraction and metaphor," and rhetorical flamboyance that often got in the way of boring facts. Smith concluded with a call for a thorough, balanced study of the Diefenbaker era and the events that shaped it. In 1995 he has given us that study. It is something all students of Canadian history will be grateful for.

Meanwhile, unrepentant, Peter C. marches on.

Plan A was to write a book about Brian Mulroney and his government. To that end, Peter C. Newman was to be given access to some of Mulroney's papers and records, to the Man Himself, and presumably to his political aides and personal friends. At some point Newman decided on a different course: it was "far too early to make definitive judgements about the Mulroney stewardship" and much more "urgent and interesting" to broaden the topic. In any case, "everyone, including its subject, seemed to have a hidden agenda that had little to do with writing an authentic chronicle of the period."

Fair enough. Judging by the slight, uninformative sections Newman has written on Mulroney, including appendices of some of the silliest and most trivial memos ever published, Plan A would have been a disaster. But Plan B--to take the period of time in office of a government about which the author argues it is much too early to make a definitive judgement and to proclaim a revolution, an obvious gimmick (apparently successful) to sell books--quickly veers out of control. And for a very simple reason.

The problem with The Canadian Revolution is that there wasn't one. It did not happen, as the subtitle says, between 1985 and 1995, and the demeanor of Canada's body politic did not, as another subtitle claims, turn from "deference to defiance." This is not to suggest that Canadian society did not change during this period, or that the decade in question may not turn out to mark a turning point in Canadian development. But, as Newman would have done well to remember, it is "much too early to make definitive judgements."

The evidence to date is somewhat mixed. The coalition of a vaguely social democratic nationalist Quebec wing with a neoconservative populist western wing, firmly in the hands of Moneylenders International through the Bank of Canada and a Bay Street broker, was unusual in that it inflated so high, lasted so long and collapsed so utterly, but it was not really unprecedented. Nor is this the first time that western and Quebec populist parties have emerged from the collapse of such a coalition. John Diefenbaker's majority in 1958 comes to mind, but there have been other cases, such as the Unionist government of Robert Borden and Arthur Meighen. Furthermore, brokerage politics was not invented by Brian Mulroney and did not forever end, as Newman says, with the defeat of the Kim Campbell government.

Indeed, the only thing that collapsed was the cast. Mulroney came into power and followed the economic blueprint prepared by the Liberals--literally the case, as Newman points out, since the study was ordered up by Prime Minister John Turner who did not get a chance to read it. The title was changed to suit Finance Minister Michael Wilson and proclaimed Tory policy. Then, after 1993, Paul Martin embraced it as his own.

The real strength of Newman's book is that he disproves his own thesis and demonstrates the amazing consistency, resiliency and--at least until now--tranquillity with which the Canadian political system can cope with change. With his usual exuberance and panache, he recounts the decade in colorful vignettes, scattered yet sometimes insightful observations, and tidbits of latrine gossip. Newman either gets to go to, or is told about, terrific parties with our political, social and economic betters, and with the bitchiness of a Truman Capote he recounts the events, the asides and the indiscretions.

The real strength of Newman's book is that he disproves his own thesis and demonstrates the amazing consistency, resiliency and--at least until now--tranquillity with which the Canadian political system can cope with change.

It's more than just good fun because this revolution came and went and apparently left all the pillars of "prerevolutionary" Canada in undisturbed order and still very much in place. The banks are still making bad loans and still raking in piles of money. The same people who were unmade are back. Newman has raided his files for outtakes of previous works, and it turns out that the people so lovingly portrayed in The Canadian Establishment are still in the game. The Reichmanns are borrowing money and are part of the action at Canary Wharf, there have been Robert Campeau sightings in the former East Germany, and even Nelson has come back from Skalbania to buy the B.C. Lions football team.

Even elements of his potted history of the Hudson's Bay Company are worked into the book. All writers use what they can, save what they can and recycle what they can, and Newman's files go back to Louis Saint-Laurent.

For a very long time, Newman presented himself as an insider with an understanding of the Canadian political and economic system grounded in a fine sense of our political history. Now he claims to be out of it, sailing the Pacific coast and living in Kitsilano, B.C. (it used to be part of Vancouver but maybe that's another revolution I slept through). Yet he still seems to overhear all the Toronto table gossip. When he moves away from gossip and his usually unattributed stories and apocryphal happenings (at the time of writing he has issued three separate apologies as a result of the book) to his observations of the revolution, he produces zany metaphors such as the defeat of Meech and Charlottetown being Canada's Vietnam. A few paragraphs later he approvingly quotes someone's reference to the election of Bloc MPs as the Confederate Army in Ottawa.

But the big revolutionary blow, the point at which the population moved from deference to defiance, occurred when Canadians rose up against Rogers Cable's so-called negative option for its new specialty channels. As a revolutionary cry, "Let us choose the channels we will pay for" lacks a certain zing. But there are times when in building a straw man you run out of straw and it is necessary to grasp for more.

Rae Murphy has just retired as professor of Canadian studies at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario. His books include Winners, Losers: The 1976 Tory Convention (1976) and Brian Mulroney: The Boy from Baie-Comeau (1984).